Why We Started Splits

The stakes were incredibly high in this year’s midterm elections. With abortion rights, health care access, Social Security and Medicare, and more on the line, we knew it was incredibly important to support Senate races however we could. These races had the power to determine how our country would look in 2023, 2024, and for years to come. 

Our team wanted to utilize the millions of users in our database who had engaged with previous split fundraising content to do the following: 

• Uplift the profiles and work of Democratic candidates to the DNC’s email and SMS subscribers.

• Raise money directly for those campaigns.

• Identify and reactivate hundreds of thousands of lapsed supporters who had given to previous split fundraising content in 2018, 2020, and the 2021 Georgia runoffs. 

Here’s how we did it:

The Set Up

We got involved as early as we could – identifying where we could be most helpful in supporting Democratic Senate incumbents early on. We sent our first emails in February 2022 – and clearly branded those campaigns. We gave folks an opportunity to opt-out because we knew that some people might not be ready to tune into the 2022 midterm cycle just yet.  

We worked with our Analytics team to help optimize email performance and to ensure as many of our supporters as possible had a chance to donate to these campaigns. We also prioritized personalized content and rapid response moments (shout out to our Communications and Research teams for their speedy approvals!) to keep our program on the cutting edge. 

Reactivation: We worked with our Analytics team to identify high-propensity donors to congressional campaigns who had since lapsed in their engagement on the DNC’s email list. We used personalized copies to call out a user’s previous support in an attempt to reactivate their support and partnered with deliverability experts at Validity to ensure top performance. These efforts often increased revenue on a single email send by 15% or more.

Personalization: To help our emails stick out in folks’ inboxes ahead of November, our team relied on our institutional data to power conditional content. Through personalization, we were able to thank donors for their previous giving, while also prompting them to make a unique contribution split with a campaign. We took specific care to acknowledge if folks had made split contributions in the past as well. Take a look: 

We found that personalized subject lines won subject line tests a majority of the time, and even doubled – sometimes tripled – conversion rates when tested against non-personalized subject lines. Overall, personalization improved our fundraising results, and the overall experience for our subscribers and donors by acknowledging their invaluable support. 

Rapid Response and Top-performing Content: In a year with hundreds of races, it can be hard to focus the spotlight on any one candidate or campaign. We took advantage of key moments in the news to run a current, timely, and relevant program that talked to supporters about what they may have been seeing or hearing on the airwaves or online. It’s no surprise that we found that our rapid response content performed the best. For example, the crudité email in support of the Fetterman campaign smashed the performance of any other Senate split email we sent prior to that moment, raising nearly six figures – over three times more than a usual email.

These tactics, the incredible campaigns we partnered with, and our team here at the DNC came together to build an unmatched split fundraising program in 2022.

The Numbers

Through Election Day on November 8, our team: 

• Sent 130 emails and SMS for 11 Senate candidates in states like Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Washington

• Raised over $4.5 million for Senate campaigns through email and SMS – a historic amount that surpassed our previous split fundraising records – making the split sends some of our highest-performing content

But What About-?

You may be thinking that all this is great, but what about the hundreds of other races that could’ve used a program like that? While the DNC’s engagement for the split series was limited to federal races, we were able to show our support for non-federal races by sending emails to our list asking our subscribers to sign up for other campaign’s email lists. This series generated new leads for these campaigns, and potentially sent new donors their way as well.

Maybe The Real Split Series Was the Friends We Made Along the Way

So, what now? What happens to the Senate split program now?

In the leadup to Sen. Raphael Warnock’s December 6 runoff election, we raised an additional $2.4 million directly for his campaign.

We’re proud of the work we’ve put in – and will apply these learnings on personalization, reactivation, and rapid response to the split program next cycle (not to mention to the email and SMS program as it currently exists) – and the work of our incredible split fundraising partners across the country. It was an honor to work alongside so many talented, innovative, and intelligent people who made all this work possible.

When looking at the success of Democrats in the midterm elections, coupled with the incredibly successful stats of this program, it’s clear that Dems are indeed in array. 💅🔵

See you in your inbox!

Rachel

One of the biggest takeaways of this midterm cycle was the undeniable importance of reproductive freedom for voters nationwide. With the Supreme Court’s decision weighing heavily, choice-motivated voters turned out in droves to protect the right to choose.

Today, we’re diving into Defend Choice, Vote Early, an innovative ads program the DNC launched ahead of the midterm elections. This program combined data-driven research, compelling creative, and close alignment of on-the-ground and online strategy. We served videos focused on reproductive freedom to choice-motivated GOTV voters in sync with the duration of early voting in various key states.

The Why 

In the months following the Dobbs ruling, the research was clear: The fight for reproductive freedom had sparked a renewed and powerful wave of Democratic enthusiasm. Wins in Kansas and special elections, and an abundance of polling highlighted how abortion rights had quickly become one of the most important issues for both motivating and persuading key voters. 

Reproductive freedom was an animating factor for Latino voters, and choice-focused messaging emerged as a compelling avenue for consolidating support. In a national survey conducted in July and August, UnidosUS found that over 70% of Latino voters believe abortion should remain legal. And according to the NALEO tracking poll, abortion emerged as the second-most important issue for likely Latino voters leading up to Election Day.

At the DNC, we recognized the opportunity at hand – and the unique role that a well-targeted and multi-channel digital ads campaign could play in getting choice-motivated voters to the polls. 

The Who 

With the expertise of our talented data science team, we built an audience of strong GOTV targets in Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. By GOTV targets, we mean folks who are likely to support Democrats and have a medium midterm turnout likelihood. The analytics team then refined this audience to align with the research discussed earlier by layering on a strong pro-choice likelihood score. 

To tighten up our audience even further, we worked with our political team to identify districts with especially competitive Congressional and/or state legislative races across key battleground states to layer on top of our existing list. We then built another audience using similar criteria (strong GOTV candidate, likely pro-choice), but this time narrowing specifically for Latino voters. 

To serve our ads to the right folks in the right moment, we divided this audience of choice-motivated GOTV voters into three flights – one flight in states that launched early voting in early October, a second in states with early voting beginning in late October, and a third directed at Latino voters in districts with competitive races throughout the country.

The How 

In partnership with our communications team, we created ads that contrasted Republicans’ attempts to ban abortion with Democrats’ commitment to defend choice. Our videos reminded voters of their power to help protect reproductive freedom, and directed viewers to IWillVote.com to make an early voting plan.

Thanks to the creative expertise of our design team, this message took the form of compelling videos and a display graphic. Our 15 and 30-second videos were produced with a digital-first approach, sized and cut appropriately for online platforms. Videos were produced in both English and Spanish.

Conclusion

Here at the DNC, we’re all about “nested opportunities.” That means we’re always searching for ways to make sure our investments move the needle in multiple races at once. And that’s exactly what the Defend Choice, Vote Early campaign accomplished. 

Through digital ads, we spoke to hundreds of thousands of choice-motivated voters about turning out early to protect reproductive freedom. These voters helped decide critical elections across multiple battleground states, up and down the ballot, and made clear that they will vote to defend choice. Across the regions we targeted, Democrats won 15 of the 16 House districts, defended every state legislative majority, flipped three state legislative chambers, won six of seven governors races, and won six of seven Senate races. In close races, we know that every little bit counts and we’re proud of the small role we played to help reach voters who voted to protect reproductive rights this cycle.

Defend Choice, Vote Early showcases what innovative and intentional investments in digital can look like:

• Highly data-driven audience development

• Synchronized messaging and targeting

• Ads that meet the political moment while maximizing the impact of every dollar spent

Thank you so much for tuning in today and for all your hard work this cycle.

Until next time,

Claire, Simón, and the rest of the Digital Ads Team

This year, we reached out to and collaborated with campaigns across the country to generate unique content for DNC and campaign social media accounts.

Our content team at the DNC was able to act as a mini-production company, giving campaigns access to graphics, pictures, and videos produced by our creative team. We offered campaigns a range of engagement opportunities that would give our team a chance to produce dynamic content. This was an especially helpful resource for campaigns that had smaller digital teams but wanted to try new strategies on their social media accounts. Overall, we coordinated with dozens of campaigns, including Democratic Senate and governor campaigns.

We asked each campaign to send us videos and photos that our team could use to create unique content, like graphics and vertical videos for TikTok and Instagram Reels. From there, we collaborated with the campaigns to determine a publishing strategy that would maximize our success. 

We published a vast range of content types, including: social graphics, hype videos, clip and captioning, candidate visualizers, Q&A videos, GIFs, and TikToks. 

From September 12th through Election Day, we published 226 posts about campaigns and candidates across six DNC-managed social media platforms. The content we made in support of these campaigns generated 11.5 million views and earned 3.9 million impressions and 440,000 engagements. 

Ahead of the Georgia Senate runoff election, we coordinated with Senator Warnock’s digital team to amplify their messaging and content creation to drive Georgia voters back to the polls. Since November 14th, we’ve published over 130 posts about the Georgia runoff, which earned 17.6 million impressions and over 800,000 engagements.

Teamwork makes the dream work!

Laney and Patricia 

Shifting our goals

The DNC has been laser focused on growing the number of supporters and donors on our email list over the years. These investments have paid off many times over. But, as our list continued to grow in size this cycle, the cost per new lead acquired also started to climb. We partnered with our analytics team on some analysis around our acquisition strategy and concluded with the rising costs and little time left in the election, we needed to change course and do it fast.

We quickly shifted our focus from broad list acquisition goals to a narrower strategy built around ads platforms, campaigns, and audiences that would yield immediate returns. We leaned heavily into Google Search, Facebook and Instagram Direct Donate, and YouTube, and immediately saw gains in our return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) and immediate revenue. In the months following the shift, we consistently raised twice as much money, at three times the previous ROAS. 

Testing and iterating our creative

It’s no secret that Facebook and Instagram feeds are competitive places to run ads. We knew that our ads were constantly running up against that viral video of a dog reuniting with its owner, that TikTok dance trend that finally made its way to Instagram, and the wedding pics from the friend of a friend who you met that one time, and of course, other ads. And with Meta increasing the number of ads in feeds, stories, and other placements, the creative we use is more important than ever. 

We were (and still are!) constantly testing and launching new campaigns to see what works best. And when we find a winner, we iterate. 

A great example of this process is our iPhone “notes-style” creative, which we ran on Facebook. This style of ad became a quick winner. It doesn’t look like a typical ad you might be used to seeing in your feed. It looks like the iPhone notes app, a place where you might jot down a to-do list or even a long apology letter to bypass Twitter character limits. And we think it works because it looks different. 

We also successfully used direct-to-camera videos from President Biden, Vice President Harris, and many other surrogates like Elizabeth Warren, Gretchen Whitmer, Chris Murphy, and Howard Dean to generate donations from folks across the country.

 Using Legislative Wins to Reactivate Supporters: Inflation Reduction Act

But, as you know based on the title of this newsletter, our team is not just focused on bringing in money. We also wanted to tell the story of the Biden-Harris administration and Democrats’ legislative wins. 

When historic pieces of popular legislation pass—like the Inflation Reduction Act—more people across the country tune in to the happenings in Washington. In these moments, we have the opportunity to tell our story. To maximize the amount of our base reached, we communicate with our supporters across as many channels as possible. When the Inflation Reduction Act passed, we immediately moved to share the positive impact the bill would have on folks across the country.

We targeted two buckets of supporters through this campaign: a voter bucket and a donor bucket. We worked with our analytics team to identify a universe of likely 2020 Biden voters in key battleground states who might not vote in the 2022 midterms. We aimed to increase the awareness of this important Democratic accomplishment, making sure folks knew that President Biden and congressional Democrats were making progress for American families.

We also prioritized reaching people we couldn’t contact via email or SMS, either because they hadn’t engaged with the DNC’s programs in a while and had become inactive, or because they had unsubscribed. 

This campaign reached hundreds of thousands of otherwise unreachable supporters and voters, telling the story of Democrats’ accomplishments at a time when they are more likely to tune in to political news. 

Integrating organic and paid social

One of the many benefits of being on the DNC’s Mobilization Team is that there are talented and creative people churning out top-notch content – content that often does big numbers. Whenever a social post takes off, it’s a sign that something about that piece of creative connected with our supporters and that we can learn a lesson and apply that insight to paid social ads.

We successfully used this strategy of repurposing high-performing social creative multiple times throughout the cycle to maintain a steady stream of profitable ads campaigns with a low lift on our creative team, freeing up their time to continue to create more content.  

Conclusion

I’m so proud of the work we did to break DNC ads fundraising records and communicate the wins of the Biden-Harris administration to folks ahead of the midterms. We learned a lot and will continue to build on these successes to raise more money and win more votes.

Background

A 2022 Pew Research poll found that half of American adults get at least some of their news from social media, with Facebook and YouTube outpacing other platforms. This shows the massive opportunity Democrats have to directly reach people where they’re spending most of their time.

In addition to @TheDemocrats, our team posts on the political social media accounts of President @JoeBiden, Vice President @KamalaHarris, and Second Gentleman @DouglasEmhoff. Our portfolio includes Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat—and the DNC’s video team manages our TikTok, Giphy, and YouTube accounts.

On any given day, we can reach an audience of more than 110 million people online with our message—making the accounts we manage one of the world’s biggest megaphones for Democratic messaging.

And that megaphone is growing! Since I started at the DNC in 2021, our organic social media accounts have driven over 8 billion impressions, 921 million video views, and a 120% increase in our audience.

To put that in context -if you were going to run a paid digital ads program on these social platforms to drive that many impressions, it’d cost roughly $62 million. Here’s how we do it:

Principal Accounts aka @JoeBiden, @KamalaHarris, and @DouglasEmhoff

The sheer scope of these accounts means that the content we post regularly drives the conversation online. One of our key metrics is whether or not we’re able to break into the top political posts of the day for each social media platform. In October, posts from @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris accounts were in the top 5 politics-related Instagram posts over a dozen times. Here are some of those posts:

It’s also critically important we ensure that all the accounts we manage are collaborating with each other. We often post videos natively on @TheDemocrats’ Twitter account and embed it on @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris’ Twitter accounts to centralize our view count, and give @TheDemocrats account a boost—plus, it ensures we’re getting the most out of each video we produce.

President Biden

People love seeing President Biden sticking up for working families and fighting back against extreme MAGA Republicans. It’s no surprise that some of our best performing content for the @JoeBiden social media accounts are opposition and contrast posts—graphic, video, and text posts that call out the GOP’s agenda.

We’ve also discovered after a series of tests that these posts tend to pop when we publish them later at night: 

Vice President Harris

Only 31% of Americans often get their news from TV. That means it’s my team’s job to harness social media to get Biden-Harris interviews and speeches in front of as many eyes as possible. We do this by repurposing TV clips and optimizing them for each social platform we run. 

A clip of Vice President Harris’ appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers discussing how the Biden-Harris administration is urging governors and states to pardon people who have been convicted for simple possession of marijuana gained over 4.6 million video views on Instagram. According to Nielsen, Late Night with Seth Meyers has about 1 million total viewers. Now that is the power of social media! 

We’ve also found after testing that nice photos of the vice president with policy-related text tend to overperform. Draw the user in with a nice photo, and leave them more informed about Biden-Harris administration successes they can then share with their followers, family, and friends. 

@TheDemocrats Accounts

@TheDemocrats social accounts are used to hype up Democrats running for office, draw contrast with the Republican Party, and spread the word about key Biden-Harris administration accomplishments. We also use our accounts to experiment and try to find new learnings to help us reach more people—everything from A/B testing copy to launching a TikTok account.

We work hand in hand with our design, video, and rapid response teams to share eye-catching graphics and videos that are accessible and optimized specifically for each social media platform. What works on Facebook might not work on Twitter and so forth.  

Optimization and iteration are core tenets of our work. If a plain-text tweet overperformed on Twitter, we quickly take that finding and develop more concepts—can we publish a captioned clip? How about a compelling graphic?

For example, we took a clip of a speech from the vice president that overperformed and turned it into a beautiful share graphic. 

Core Themes

Since January of 2021, the top-performing social media content for the DNC social accounts have fallen into a few core buckets:

• Biden-Harris wins

• Economic news

• Republican contrast

Campaign Coordination

Our social media and video teams spearheaded a project to collaborate with top campaigns of the 2022 cycle. Senate and gubernatorial campaigns across the country sent us video, photo, and design assets to work with, and we used these to create content for @TheDemocrats’ social media accounts. 

The end result is that the DNC social accounts uplifted these campaigns, all while creating new assets that the campaigns could amplify from their accounts—a win-win for everyone involved. This project was especially helpful for smaller campaigns that didn’t have large digital teams to create organic social media content. 

To date, we’ve created and published more than 100 pieces of content for our social media accounts, driving nearly 4M impressions and 11.5M video, GIF, and sticker views.

In conclusion,

We are so grateful to DNC leadership for trusting the vision and seriously investing in organic social media. None of this massive growth and none of our learnings would exist without having the investment we’ve gotten—and having it early.

There are only a few weeks left until the Georgia runoff election, and we plan to keep pushing out content encouraging people to VOTE. 

As I tell my team: stay hydrated, and I’ll see you online.

Alicia

Earlier this year, with the help of our partners at Studio Gradients (the team behind the Biden-Harris campaign brand and design), we launched a refreshed look for the DNC with the goal of injecting the brand with revitalized energy using brighter colors and flexible typography. 

We see this refresh as an outgrowth of the Biden-Harris campaign with fonts that enable us to create content for our accounts that feels complimentary to the style the White House uses for the official @POTUS accounts.

The refresh is influenced by our party’s heritage as well as drawing inspiration from modern news sources.

Some of the new additions to the brand are:

An Expanded Color Palette

The refresh introduces a larger palette of 26 colors with a focus on accessibility as well being vibrant enough to be able to cut through the noise of the internet. With this expanded palette we’re able to vary the look and colors used in our graphics to keep things interesting. 

New Fonts

Two new typefaces are now part of our arsenal: the new sans serif font Trade Gothic, and the new serif font ITC Cheltenham. Thanks to these fresh typefaces, we’re able to create different combinations that allow either font to become the primary or secondary font, with the additional benefit that we’re able to include as much information as we need to in our graphics due to the increased flexibility with spacing, weight and style.

Below are some recent successful social graphics, print collateral, and merch for the store that the design team has put together.

The refresh looks to excite people about being Democrats while also making sure that all the information our supporters need to know is easy to read and understand leading up to the midterm elections.

Thanks for reading.

Christian

In this newsletter, I’m excited to share our work to activate our allies on the internet and build an online community to counter the MAGA Republicans’ echo chamber.

Let’s get to it. 

Why This Matters

The goal of our digital partnerships work is to deliver our message to an online audience beyond the reach of the channels we help operate: @JoeBiden, @KamalaHarris, and @TheDemocrats. 

By providing resources to Democrats across the country with both large and small followings, we can empower people to share content that advances our message and cuts through the extreme MAGA Republican noise online. 

If you’re reading this newsletter, it is perhaps not news to you that conservatives have a structural advantage on platforms like Facebook, which 31% of Americans rely on as a regular source of news. 

Our friends at the Center for American Progress have pulled together data showing just how dramatic this advantage is:

Conservative pages relentlessly amplify Republican messaging across social media platforms. That means as voters spend more of their time scrolling through algorithmic feeds, they are seeing a great deal more conservative messaging. 

Simply put: In order to compete, we need to get our message in front of more people online and beyond the reach of the channels we operate. We need a better delivery system.

So, what can the DNC do to empower our allies in this fight? We’re starting by making it as easy as possible for influencers, surrogates, and others to share our content. 

Greenfly: Getting Everyone on the Same Page

We use Greenfly to provide our top supporters with essential content that can be easily shared on social media. Greenfly is a content distribution app that allows us to send our supporters push notifications asking them to share graphics, videos, and articles that they can post on their own accounts. 

For example, by asking our Greenfly users to share the graphic below with their followers, we more than doubled the number of people who originally engaged with it on DNC channels.

This kind of regular engagement makes it a helpful tool we can use to focus the online conversation among our allies. 

Earlier this year, we asked our users to share graphics, videos, and articles about the Biden-Harris administration's work to combat the baby formula shortage. 

Overall, our users shared this content hundreds of times across social media platforms and generated thousands of engagements — helping shape the online conversation with DNC-produced content.

Our goal is to leverage the reach of our allies in order to advance DNC messaging priorities, counter misleading narratives, and coordinate our response across the internet in rapid response moments. 

Who uses Greenfly?

We are working with folks across the broader DNC organization to build and expand our Greenfly user base and onboard allies with both large and small followings. So far:

• Our organizing team has recruited and trained hundreds of grassroots supporters on how to use the platform. 

• We have connected with dozens of allied influencers and activists. 

• Our states team has onboarded state party officials from across the country. 

• Our communications team has onboarded high-profile surrogates and other allies.

As a result, we have built a sizable and active user base that will continue to grow as we get closer to Election Day. Importantly, these users will be part of the DNC community beyond November — part of the ecosystem we’re building to shape the conversation online for years to come. 

If you’d like to join the DNC’s Greenfly chapter, please fill out this interest form. 

TikTok Creators: Leveraging New Platforms to Advance Our Message

Since the launch of the DNC TikTok account earlier this year, we have been conducting targeted outreach to creators on the app and onboarding them to our Greenfly chapter. 

These creators have a combined audience of millions of people. Through Greenfly, we can provide creators with visual assets specifically made for TikTok, empowering them to share our message with hard-to-reach younger audiences.

The DNC Content Library: A Resource for Democrats Everywhere

Through Greenfly, we provide our allies with an extensive library of high-quality, well-researched graphics and videos that they can share online with the click of a button. 

With the help of our in-house creative team, we are able to provide issue-specific libraries full of constantly updated content our partners can share — including an entire library of content for TikTok and other vertical video platforms.

Our content library has become a go-to resource for influencers, surrogates, talkers, and other partners across the Democratic ecosystem — including state parties across the country. Smaller parties, with fewer resources to dedicate towards digital programs, can easily share relevant DNC content to their own localized audiences. That’s just one example of how we’ve leveraged the DNC content library to support our allies across the Democratic space. 

Building the Megaphone: Where Do We Go From Here? 

In the months ahead, we plan to increase the scope and scale of our partnerships network  and operationalize it in new ways. This includes: 

• Growing our network in Greenfly with a particular focus on people with large followings beyond Twitter. 

• Working with departments across the DNC to engage with and recruit high-profile surrogates to partner with us.

• Hosting regular messaging briefings with DNC staff for key influencers and partners. 

• Hosting Instagram Live and Twitter Spaces events with key online surrogates. 

Conclusion

Through the first two quarters of 2022, our partnerships program helped generate 83 million impressions online for content aligned with Democrats’ messaging priorities — and we’re just getting started. 

The work we are doing to engage influencers, allies, and other partners is an essential part of our effort to counter MAGA Republicans’ narratives, deliver our message ahead of the midterms, and support an online ecosystem that will help elect Democrats for years to come.

If you have any questions or thoughts, or want to collaborate, please reach out! We’re excited to keep building new online pathways to deliver our message. 

Kyle

The News Environment

While Americans still count on television, print, and radio for information, more folks than ever get their news online – and often, that news is filtered for them by social media algorithms driven by engagement. 

In this constantly changing information landscape, our team is focused on cutting through the noise with approachable, fact-based messages that are designed to be screenshotted, reposted, copied-and-pasted, downloaded, and shared in as many ways as possible.

What We Do

When news breaks, we work to get our content live on our channels and distributed to our partners as quickly as possible.

How We Break Through

Our program involves creative uses of graphics, video, and copywriting to reach a wide and diverse audience across the DNC accounts and the campaign accounts of the White House principals. Below are some key examples of this:

This post has the 4th-most impressions of any @TheDemocrats post in the last year, 30.2x more impressions than our average.

We collaborate closely with teams across the DNC, including DNC Communications and Research, to execute creative concepts on the latest news, combat disinformation with unvarnished facts, and highlight out-of-touch comments from extremist Republicans. Our most successful content has garnered millions of impressions and driven conversation — such as this simple question that is our 3rd most-impressed post in the last year, generating over 2 million impressions on Twitter alone:

We cut right to the chase to provide supporters with the facts they need to know:

Through this work, we are constantly building reliably successful formats that align with our principle of simple shareability. For example, one of our top video formats is what we call a “side-by-side,” which often juxtaposes two voices or points out Republican hypocrisy (of which there is no shortage of source material):

In collaboration with the Design Team, we also apply this format with static graphics to convey visual contrasts:

Delivering Our Message

In a world where algorithmic feeds scramble users’ timelines and people are bombarded with notifications, repeating our message is one of the most important strategies we have to make sure it breaks through. That’s why we sometimes post the same high engagement message over and over again. 

Thanks to our partnerships team, this content has become a central, dependable resource hub for state parties and other partners , and we have also received organic pickup from many of the biggest names in politics. We are consistently breaking new impression and engagement records as we build out our program’s capacity, experiment with content strategy, and grow our audience. 

In the months ahead, we are planning to continue innovating how we inform voters of the Republican Party’s radical MAGA agenda and sharpen the contrast between their plans and the values and actions of Democrats across the country. Developing and delivering content that breaks through is crucial to shaping the conversation online and reaching voters where they spend their time in 2022. 

Hey folks! I’m elated to meet y’all and get to talk about the cool work we’re doing here (if I do say so myself). My name is Julia Salavantis, and I’m the Democratic National Committee’s Donor Cultivation Manager – which means I manage our monthly donor program along with some of our donor cultivation programs. 

Let’s get nerdy for a minute

Monthly donors, also referred to as sustainers, are quite literally the people who sustain our party. By choosing to make recurring monthly contributions instead of one-time gifts, our donors allow us to plan and invest in our programs way further in advance than we otherwise could. We like to say there are no off years at the DNC, and by continuing to build out relationships with our monthly donors even after an election, the DNC can maintain and grow critical party infrastructure with dependable income month after month. 

Below you can see over a decade of monthly donations. Knowing 2020 would be a huge opportunity to grow our monthly sustainers, we took strides to ramp up our investment into this program! This dedicated capacity made a huge difference in keeping people on the file over time and decreasing the “churn” or the cancellations of monthly gifts post-election.

PART 1:

Upgrades… Do’s + Don'ts 

During the past six months we’ve been testing some ideas for upgrading current monthly donors' active contributions. This means we’re asking current sustainers to increase the amount they give every month. We approach this with caution and empathy, because we would never want donors to think we aren’t already so grateful for what they are already giving. We run these campaigns over telemarketing, email, and peer-to-peer texting once every few months and have seen great results. We’ve seen around 500 upgrades across channels since February 2022, which will bring in an additional $85k if folks continue their gifts through the midterm elections. Here’s what one of my conversations looked like:

By having these conversations directly with our supporters we’re able to build relationships organically, and actually get to know folks on a deeper level!

PART 2:

Keeping Sustainers Happy

Everyone wants a happy donor! We try our best to make sure folks feel taken care of, which our superb donor cultivation team spends a lot of time doing over email, phone, mail… you name it. We’ve also been trying out some fun things like sending a custom sticker to folks who become sustainers to certain campaigns. 

DNC Deputy Executive Director Roger Lau (who is also a monthly donor!) making calls to some of our sustaining donors to thank them for their continued support.

PART 3:

How do we keep people engaged?

Making sure that our donors feel informed, valued, and supported is the best strategy for keeping their monthly gifts active. Seems like simple logic to me — if you feel good about where you’re putting your money every month and understand its impact, you’re more likely to continue giving and become more involved in other ways as well. Lots of our sustainers are also volunteers or supporters who regularly attend our virtual events.

Our Monthly Donor Briefing with Reyna Walters-Morgan, our Director of Civic Engagement and Voter Protection, where we talked about all things voter protection.

Monthly donors are investors — and they are putting their trust in us to do good work with their investments. Anything we can do to show them exactly what their money is doing helps build trust and understanding. 

To that end, we host Monthly Donor Briefings with members of our DNC leadership team where we get into the weeds about what their programs are doing and how monthly donations make all the difference in funding them. Supporters are able to connect with us and each other through a live chat box during these events, which means we can provide folks with resources they want and answers to their questions while getting face to face time.

Closing

All of this gives me the opportunity to do my favorite part of my job — talking to our supporters one-on-one! Hearing from the folks who literally sustain our organization, and maintaining long-term relationships with them, help inform the info I give to DNC leadership about what our supporters really care about. 

I’m always thrilled to talk about all things monthly donors, so thanks for reading along with me! If you have any friends or colleagues who are interested in grassroots fundraising, please feel free to pass this newsletter along to them. And maybe you’ve become convinced to become a monthly donor yourself… if so, you can join at https://democrats.org/join_grassroots 😇

If you’d ever like to chat about monthly donor programs, please reach out! 

Julia Salavantis

Donor Cultivation Manager, Democratic National Committee

Hi everyone! We’re Olivia Hill (DNC Leadership Circle Donor Manager) and Christen Sparago (DNC Sustaining Donor Manager). Day to day we both serve as resources for grassroots donors, and when we’re not on the phone, texting or emailing with them, we’re thinking about how to reach them. Donor cultivation is the name of the game for us, but we can’t have a 1:1 relationship with each of the 60,000+ donors between our two programs. Our donor cultivation events provide an extremely powerful opportunity for us to share our priorities with them and communicate our gratitude, answer their questions, and keep them engaged.

Here’s how we do it!

Feature:

In the last half of the 2020 cycle, we moved our town halls from the robodialer to the internet. In the past, these “telephone town halls” were held quarterly, over the phone, and through the transition into working from home we decided to test out how Zoom-friendly our donor base was. After just one event, we were hooked! We partnered with a production team and scaled these virtual town halls up and up and up to serve our donors events that have proved themselves well worth the time, resources, and effort. 

As we leaned into this new format, we had two main goals: say a sincere ‘thank you’ to our donors AND remind them of our off-year investment needs. Kicking these off in the run up to the 2020 general election capitalized on our donors’ election-year enthusiasm, utilized the election-year resources, and started making the case for building years - this was an especially important point for us to make to the millions of new donors to the DNC in 2020.

And reader, we succeeded. By the end of the cycle, we had been able to reach over 5,200 donors through eight town halls. Anecdotally, we’ve heard from dozens of donors that they’ve attended several town halls and sincerely appreciate the time “in the room” with members of our team. Our average watch time has nearly tripled since our telephone town dall days, signaling that not only do folks enjoy the livestream format, but they are also increasingly engaged with the topics and speakers we highlight during the events.

Although these events were meant to be cultivation touchpoints and therefore did not have a specific focus on fundraising, we also managed to raise $10,000! (Some attendees even posted in the event chat to let us know that they maxed out to candidates who were speaking on the call!)

Launching a virtual event series

With so many virtual events cropping up in the COVID era, we decided to take advantage of our donors being increasingly familiar with Zoom, and brought our formerly quarterly Telephone Town Hall online and with video for the first time in DNC history. Our goal for this first call was to give monthly and mid-level donors a sincere thank you from our team, and an opportunity to hear from Party leaders how we scaled up from off years to the 2020 general election.

Our first-ever Virtual Grassroots Town Hall was in March 2020, and featured then-DNC Chair Tom Perez with 300+ monthly and mid-level donors on a Zoom webinar. 

This Zoom webinar town hall was a dramatic improvement from the telephone town halls we’d done previously, with relatively low lift from staff and speakers. Donors enjoyed getting to see Tom while he spoke, and submitted feedback like this after the event:

"It was very informative. Tom Perez gave a smart and clear talk about the vision of the Party and the work that needs to be done. We should do more Zoom meetings to inform us of the strategies taking place all over the country to support candidates running on all levels! Thank you!"

So, we took it up another notch:

The feedback from this first Virtual Town Hall was overwhelmingly positive, and with buy-in from senior staff and some extra resources, we were able to kick things up another notch. We had an opportunity to partner with Weymouth-Watson on the production side, which gave our events a professional livestream feel. 

We brought on some headlining principals, like Sen. Cory Booker, Sen. Jon Ossoff, Rep. Grace Meng, Secretary Julián Castro, and MANY more.

We also started using Mobilize America to collect RSVPs and automatically receive attendee feedback after the event, and our email team created a beautiful invitation series using Movable Ink to get our list excited:

Our secondary goal was to repeatedly make the case for off-year giving so that we can continue to build the infrastructure that got us to the victories we’ve had these past four years. 

Because these events were received so well by our donors in 2020, we have continued them on a monthly basis in 2021. We have even seen our best attendance and engagement already at the start of 2021: our first town hall of the year more than tripled our previous record for attendance, and we received more than double the highest number of donations during the call (with no fundraising ask!). 

This bump could be a result of a less saturated virtual events calendar post election, or the result of months of conditioning donors that we need them to stay engaged in off years. Either way, we’re glad they’re still tuning in!

🧵Thread we think you should read (and retweet) 🧵

Closing:

Thanks for sticking around to learn about how we ramped up these events heading into the election, and kept these folks around for months after! Want to see one of these events for yourself? Watch out for our next Town Hall at democrats.org/townhall

Until next time,
Christen & Olivia

Hey y’all, it’s Christen Sparago, Sustaining Donor Manager at the DNC! I’m back with another look at the Mobilization monthly giving program.

Team Mobz loves an executive summary, and the topline here is: with consistent investment of time and resources, and creative ideas from everyone on our team, the DNC quadrupled our monthly recurring revenue while keeping this program the most grassroots it’s ever been. I personally love to see it. Let’s get started!

Feature:

Last time, I talked about how post-election drop-off was going to be a focus for us throughout 2020. The goal was to keep our donors invested after a top-of-ticket victory (🤞) in November. Remember this chart?

It’s easy to see from this chart why mitigating drop-off would be a priority for the DNC. When one-time giving drops off post-election, our monthly donors play a critical role in keeping the doors open and the lights on. So how do we explain to our monthly donors that we still need their support after the election is over?

The answer: tell them.

Honest, straightforward communication with donors is the hallmark of the Grassroots Partners program. I spend most of my time talking to donors via phone, email, or text message, and I’ve found that when you’re trying to earn someone’s support, there is no argument more compelling than the truth. And the truth is that DNC monthly donors account for about 7% of total grassroots fundraising the month before the election, but as much as 15-25% in the months that follow. 

Here’s how we built a donor-centric, revenue-positive program, before and after the election.

Pre-Election: T-minus 10… 9… 8… 🚀

Throughout 2020, we took every opportunity to explain the power of monthly giving to our supporters. Our email team included a note from me at the top of each monthly Sustainer Newsletter in which I underscored that the DNC operates year-round, and that monthly gifts would help us maintain our investments in data, tech, and Party infrastructure even past November 3. 

In the weeks leading up to the election, we continued to chase every cancelled recurring gift with a text within 48 hours of cancellation explaining the power of a monthly gift in Q1 2021, and asking donors to keep giving. Simply sending these texts every week has helped us recapture over $5,000/month in recurring revenue.

Starting in September, we launched a series of Virtual Grassroots Town Halls for our monthly and mid-level donors to say thank you and explain why our work as a party doesn’t end with any election cycle. We recruited DNC officers and members of DNC leadership, candidates for U.S. Senate, current and former elected representatives, and members of our own team to join us. We answered questions our donors submitted to us about everything from Presidential debate prep to the Georgia Senate runoff, talked about how monthly donations helped us get the most money and votes in history, and said sincere thank you’s. About 4,000 of our donors attended one of these events, and so far they are 3% more likely to have kept their monthly gift active post-election than donors who did not.

Thank You, Thank You, Thank You is how President-elect(!) Joe Biden ended every staff call in the final days leading up to the election, and it summarizes our pre-election communication with our monthly donors. Regardless of the outcome of the election, we all felt that our donors deserved a proper thank you! To that end, most of our monthly donors received either a thank you note in the mail signed by me, or a similar mailing that included one of our DNC face masks. And members across the mobilization team placed thank you calls to hundreds of sustainers between Election Day and when the race was officially called.

Post-Election: Congratulations, We Made It 🛬

In previous election cycles, we’ve seen anywhere between 15-25% of donors cancel their recurring gifts in the months post-election. Almost 13% of our monthly donors cancelled their gift shortly after Election Day, but by chasing cancellations individually and ramping up recruitment of new sustainers to offset the dropoff, we’ve decreased that drop to 8%.

Text conversations like this one have helped a few hundred cancelled sustainers start new gifts in just the past three weeks.

We know not every grassroots donor can give year-round, which is why we are also focusing on recruiting new monthly donors throughout the remainder of 2020.

In November 2020, our most successful recruitment pushes for new sustainers were SMS blasts and emails about the GA Senate runoff.

Our SMS congratulating donors on taking back the White House brought on over 500 new sustainers organically, without a monthly gift ask. And over 100 donors have gone to democrats.org and started a new monthly gift since Election Day. 

We’ve also sent SMS pushes to donors who made weekly gifts to the DNC and Biden Victory Fund until the election. These efforts have brought on several hundred new sustainers, as well.

In Summary…monthly giving makes it possible for grassroots donors to have enormous impact with a commitment of only a few dollars per month. We raised four times as much from monthly contributions in October 2020 as we did in October 2016 -- yet the average gift in this program has remained $18 throughout. And to top it off, in 2020, this program alone is projected to raise the same amount as the Mobilization team raised online in 2019.

Job opportunities:

In a shocking twist, we would like to use this opportunity to plug all of the incredible folks from the BFP digital and DNC mobilization teams who are on the job hunt! You know the drill.

🧵Thread we think you should read (and retweet) 🧵

Applying for jobs? We’ve got a thread for you!

Closing:

The Mobilization Team collectively invested in recurring donors, and it paid off -- literally. I’m so proud to have helped build long-term infrastructure in our Grassroots Partners program this cycle, and I’m excited to see this program continue to grow.

With you in the fight,

Christen

Hey there! I’m Hannah Flom, Director of Content Strategy and Distribution at the DNC. For this next post-election edition of “Does this bring money or votes?” I’m here to talk about how we built a digital ambassadors program with influencers, content creators, and advocates to seed the internet with voter education info and mobilize their followers to the polls.

The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to a dramatic increase in the amount of social media content consumption across social media — from Facebook to TikTok and beyond. So we designed a content distribution program to meet voters where they are online, with content they want to consume, and from a messenger they trust.

Let’s dive in.

Feature:

Recruiting Advocates📱

In partnership with the Biden for President campaign, we launched a first-of-its-kind digital ambassador program — dedicated to turning out a young, diverse crowd for the election.

To power this program, we invested in a new tool called Greenfly. Greenfly is a content distribution app that allows us to send graphics and videos, along with a suggested caption, to users via push notification — and they are able to post directly to social media. We first saw great success with this tool during the 2020 Democratic National Convention, and continued using it to mobilize voters this fall.

We worked with a variety of partners across the DNC and BFP — from the first-ever digital partnerships team at BFP to our coalitions and political teams to state parties and the coordinated campaign — to recruit advocates to join our program. Even @JoeBiden recruited folks to join Greenfly!

And perhaps most importantly, we focused on building a diverse ambassadors community, providing them content they want to share. At the end of the campaign, more than 80% of Greenfly users engaged in-app with our content.

Identifying Influencers 🤳

From the global pandemic to a worldwide racial justice movement, 2020 is the year of influencers speaking out on their platforms. Or as Buzzfeed said: the era of influencers being apolitical online is over.

Influencers have real, authentic relationships with their followers, and they regularly move them to take action. So we identified influencers in key battleground states who built a strong community — whether they had 2,000 or 200,000 followers — to partner with the DNC on voter education. 44% (!!) of the influencers we reached out to agreed to partner with us, and 90% posted more than once.

At least once per week, we sent influencers graphics, up-to-date message guidance, and calls-to-action. Whether it was a state-specific graphic, an Instagram Story slide, or a Spanish language graphic, we encouraged influencers to share what was authentic to their voice and platform.

Investing in Content ✨

The third, and potentially most important, part of our program was to meet key moments with authentic and digestible content. We did this in a few ways:

1. 🎨 We worked hand-in-hand with the DNC design team to create a second brand of engaging and shareable graphics, specifically designed for influencers and digital ambassadors.

2. 📍 We segmented our Greenfly and influencer audiences by state (namely key battleground states), and also offered the opportunity for users to opt-in to Spanish-language content.

3. ⏰ We distributed content for timely rapid response moments, whether it was the presidential debates or state-specific updates during GOTV.

We designed all voter education graphics so they are (1) easily consumable and (2) eye-catching and engaging — knowing this would help the graphics reach exponentially more people by followers sharing the influencer’s Instagram in-feed post on their own Instagram Story.

From Demi Lovato (93.3M million followers) to Sarah Caroline Crawford in Georgia (2.2k followers) to Chrissy Rutherford in New York (147k followers) to TikTok creator Amelie Zilber (1.7M followers), these influencers shared content to help their followers vote — whether it was National Voter Registration Day graphics in September to “Stay in Line” graphics on Election Day.

Our distributed content program proved to be incredibly effective for key rapid response moments — especially during GOTV. With the ban on political paid ads from Facebook and Google, we relied on Greenfly to spread critical updates through organic content, whether it was encouraging folks in Maricopa County in Arizona to stay in line or letting folks in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District know that their polling place extended early vote hours.

Job opportunities:

We’re back to plugging all of the great folks across the BFP digital and DNC mobilization teams looking for their next job. Check them out!

🧵Thread we think you should read (and retweet) 🧵

Closing:

By investing in new tools and creative content, we were able to effectively mobilize thousands of influencers and grassroots supporters to share content on social media, who in turn mobilized their followers to the polls.

Thanks for reading! And feel free to shoot me a DM at @hannah_flom with any thoughts or ideas on ways we can continue investing in organic content.

Hannah

@hannah_flom

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the latest edition of “Does this bring in money or votes?” -- I’m Anna Kelsey, the DNC’s Grassroots Prospects Manager, back to tell you more about the reactivation program that my colleague Jose overviewed last week: how we stood up the DNC’s first-ever supporter reactivation program in the last three months of the cycle -- one that reactivated millions of supporters and accounted for over 16% of the DNC’s online fundraising revenue in the last quarter of the cycle -- and the learnings you can use to guide your own reactivation work!

Feature:

The Mission

The DNC has been running an email program for nearly two decades, which means we have millions of email subscribers who aren’t active on our list anymore. But with the most important election of our lifetimes on the horizon, the DNC team realized this was the moment to try to get those supporters back on board -- and that’s why they brought me on board the email team!

My mission: reactivate as many of our lapsed subscribers as possible and get them back to engaging with and donating to our main email list, without sacrificing our excellent and hard-won inbox placement.

As you can see above, we were successful on that second piece! Read on to hear more about what we did for part one of that mission and our thought process behind it -- but before we get into that, here’s...

What We Learned

The work we did was possible because of the proprietary trove of historical data that the DNC has collected over early two decades of emailing supporters -- but there were still some takeaways that other organizations can use when thinking about reactivation:

• Keep your data, no matter what! Our historical behavioral data was incredibly important to the success of this program, and throwing it away -- even data as granular as individual opens and clicks -- would have cost us millions of dollars.

• Reactivation requires planning and care. If we’d simply mailed random groups of inactives blindly, we would’ve had serious deliverability problems: when we tested sending to a tiny group of names we deemed “risky,” the bounce rate was 94% higher than on our regular inactive sends. Taking the time to pick the right audience is worth it!

• However you approach reactivation, find a way that allows you to be both systematic and nimble. More on the specifics of what we did below -- but what it really came down to was both having detailed plans and being ready to change course quickly in response to results. Your reactivation program might look different from ours, but you should find a way to juggle both of these needs -- otherwise, you’re almost certainly leaving money on the table.

Data Collection

Targeting our inactive subscribers wasn’t as straightforward as it might seem -- before we could actually email any inactives, we needed to identify who was available to us and what data we had about them. We also aggregated all of the data points we had for each lapsed subscriber, like how many times they had opened or clicked in the past, which cycles they’d engaged in, their donation history, and their status on the OFA and HFA lists.

We eventually used these points to divide our inactives into three main buckets -- very recent inactives, deep inactives with little to no historical data points, and deep inactives with many historical data points -- and ran two distinct programs.

Program 1: The Reactivation Series

The first program was a five-message automated reactivation series which went to (relatively) small cohorts of inactives with similar historical behavior. The series featured the types of messages that have been most successful on our main list -- a “greatest hits,” if you will!

Breaking this group up into cohorts had two main advantages:

• First, it allowed us to prioritize targeting inactives that I believed had the highest propensity to reactivate through the series first, getting them into our primary email program with the most time to donate before Election Day.

• Second, this program helped us identify what criteria are the best indicators that an individual will reactivate -- which will help us build on and optimize this work in future cycles.

Program 2: One-Off Sends

Our reactivation series was great for bringing in supporters we thought had a very good chance of reactivating back into the fold and for comparing cohorts -- but it didn’t take advantage of important campaign moments or the urgency that kept ramping up the closer we got to Election Day. That’s why, in conjunction with the series, we implemented a strategy of sending one-off emails at key moments to much larger groups.

For this approach, we mostly sent to larger swaths of more recent inactives and deep inactives without much historical data, and chose sends around big moments of excitement, like the VP announcement and the debates, along with emails from high-performing surrogates, like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and (of course) Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.

Our Takeaways

Altogether, the reactivation program was hugely successful: Between our two approaches, we sent every single emailable inactive at least two emails and reactivated millions of supporters -- who accounted for 16% of our online fundraising revenue in the last quarter of the election. 

Having these two distinct -- but complementary -- approaches was critical to the success of the program overall. Our one-off sends helped us ensure that we weren’t leaving anything on the table in critical moments, and were a source of a higher volume of reactivations overall. The series gave us actionable data we can use in future cycles -- and takeaways that we were able to use towards the end of the cycle to cut the widest possible reactivation prospect audiences, as we shifted more resources into one-off sends. We’re also excited to look at the long-term results of this program and measure which of these two approaches leads to more sustained engagement with our primary email program after Election Day and into 2021.

Job opportunities:

We’re hosting our 2020 General Election Digital Debrief *tomorrow* and would love to see you there! Register for the event here and see our full list of breakout sessions here.

🧵Thread we think you should read (and retweet) 🧵

Closing:

Thank you for joining me on this reactivation journey! It was an incredibly exciting project to work on over the last few months, and I hope you enjoyed reading about it. If you’re dying to know how we did this, stay tuned for a later newsletter with more of the practical details about the tech tools & data crunching that made this all possible! 

Happy last month of 2020(!!!),

Anna

Hello everybody! We’re Emily Keller, the DNC Social Media Director, and Rebecca Kwon, DNC Social Content Associate. This year we shifted our social program’s goals for GOTV, prioritizing one-on-one conversations with voters and working to meet voters where they are. By focusing almost entirely on voter education, we were able to help voters get the information they needed, without sacrificing our accounts’ followers, reach, or engagement (all three actually increased!!!).  

Let’s talk about how we did it:

Feature:

Autoreplies 📲

Working closely with our friends at the convention, we saw the tremendous success they had running a Twitter autoreply program reminding users to tune in. Users interacted with a tweet and were opted in to receive replies from the convention’s account. We wanted to know: could we use this tool to help voters vote? We wanted to be more specific than a generic national campaign, so we also worked to set up an opt-in path for all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Then we set out drafting the content — we needed state-specific dates, deadlines, and rules to share with voters. With the help of state voter protection directors and the team at Biden for President, we drafted 416 tweets to remind voters about everything from registration to polling hours on Election Day. The result was pushing voting reminders right into a user’s @ mentions: over the course of October we had over 15,000 individual conversations with voters, and those tweets had a click-through rate 6 times higher than our average.

Voter Education for GOTV 🗳️

But we knew we couldn’t just wait for voters to come to us — we had to go to them. That’s why we began searching for voters who were using Twitter to find voting information so we could give them the resources they needed to cast their ballot. From broader search queries for voters who asked “how do I vote?” and “where do I vote?” to more tailored searches for voters who had questions specific to their state or circumstance, we left no stone unturned. We found several voters who wanted to vote early, but had no idea how, voters who didn’t know how to find their polling location, voters who required accommodations at the polls but didn’t know how to seek assistance, and voters who wanted to know if they could vote in person if they hadn’t received their ballot in the mail.  We were able to be a resource to them by directing them to their state’s voting page on IWillVote.com or the DNC’s voter assistance hotline. 

By essentially turning our account into the voting edition of an airline’s customer service team, we were able to directly follow up and answer the questions of hundreds of voters. By Election Day, we had talked to over 800 voters individually on Twitter, and had a 54% response rate

Vote Tripling

We were helping voters vote, but why stop there? We knew our reach and impact didn’t have to stop at a single conversation. So we set out with a simple ask for voters — “Can you remind 3 of your friends to vote too?” We looked for voters who finished exercising their right to vote by looking for ‘I Voted’ selfies on Twitter and Instagram. We found plenty of these tagged under the hashtags #IVoted, #EarlyVoter, #IVotedBidenHarris2020, and in many other variations of these hashtags. 

After Instagram began hiding hashtags in searches, we got creative — looking for voters who had tagged @JoeBiden or had used “I Voted” as the photo location. And our efforts to find these voters proved worthwhile: We commented on over 1,800 posts, had a 67% response rate, and had our best week for Instagram audience growth ever.

Job opportunities:

We have a lot of great folks across the BFP digital and DNC mobilization teams looking for their next job. Take a look!

🧵Thread we think you should read (and retweet) 🧵

Closing:

For the voter mobilization portion of this election cycle, we prioritized individual conversations with voters over the content on our timeline. And it paid off: Not only were we able to better help voters and give them more tailored information, but by going to search for voters ourselves, we saw an increase in followers, reach, and engagement on all of our content. 

If you reach out to voters, answer their questions, and meet them where they are, your audience will respond.

Thanks for reading!

Emily (@egkeller) & Rebecca (@kwon_beccs)

Hey everybody! I’m Esteban Fernandez, the DNC’s Digital Ads Director and resident horsegirl. Last time you heard from me, I talked about our team’s unique structure and how it shaped our approach to digital advertising. Now, I’m here to tell you all about how our integrated approach combined with historical investments in digital helped acquire millions of emails, break online fundraising records, and of course, win the White House. So, saddle up! We have lots to cover.

Feature:

2 horses - 1 race

Along with scaling the DNC’s ads program, our team faced an even greater challenge: taking the reins of the Biden Victory Fund (BVF) direct response ads program. BVF was a joint fundraising entity between the Biden campaign, the DNC, and 47 state parties designed to build on the DNC’s infrastructure to defeat Donald Trump and elect Democrats nationwide. With just four months until Election Day, we were tasked with building an acquisition program that prioritized immediate ROAS for the campaign while also promoting long-term list growth for the DNC.

Luckily, we weren’t alone in this massive endeavor. We partnered with an all-star lineup of digital experts at Middle Seat to form a hybrid team that blended the benefits of an in-house team with the resources and expertise of a best-in-class agency. Together, we overhauled a small program designed to drive the highest possible ROI out of a small universe of supporters and turned it into an expansive list-building and revenue driving operation.

Since we had a short runway, we immediately made large investments in list rentals, which is one of the smartest things we could’ve done. These ended up driving an ROI of over 850%! However, the bulk of our work revolved around broadly expanding our content across a wider array of audiences on all channels. Between email acquisition and direct donate ads we launched between 7 to 15 new campaigns every single day on topics ranging from recent polling to dogs for Biden and everything in between. Today, I’m proud to share that through these efforts we acquired 3.6 million new supporters and raised over $103 million in lifetime contributions in just over 100 days!

There was also no shortage of excitement on the DNC side of the fence. As we galloped full speed into the general election, we knew our payback window on most acquisition investments was rapidly shrinking. This drove us to pivot from primarily focusing on lifetime value to prioritizing immediate revenue, so we doubled down on our direct donate efforts and invested heavily on Google Search. 

Throughout the past year, this platform was consistently one of our largest revenue drivers, so when the news cycle was dominated by the presidential election and donor enthusiasm was skyrocketing, we were able to ride that momentum to scale quickly and efficiently. The results from this shift speak for themselves, and from August to November, we raised approximately 2x more immediate revenue than in all of 2017, 2018, and 2019 combined.

How did we do this?

None of these achievements, or the ultimate success of these programs, would’ve been possible without the incredible support of grassroots donors. Small-dollar donors knew exactly what was at stake under four more years of Donald Trump, and they stepped up with unbridled enthusiasm throughout the year. 

The same was true of DNC leadership, who understood the importance of making historic investments in digital to harness that enthusiasm. Just look at this graph!

Our integrated structure and unprecedented investment from leadership allowed the DNC to tap into the right data and know exactly when the right time was to shift from lifetime value to immediate revenue. Likewise, data drove the BVF program’s goals and measure of success. We met with the campaign’s analytics team three times per week, and through this constant communication there was never any ambiguity about where our program stood.

One of the most understated secrets to any program’s success is a healthy team dynamic. This was the first presidential cycle for every member on the DNC’s ads team, so scaling our program while merging with an agency team to build another was no small feat. The DNC and Middle Seat’s partnership resulted in a seamlessly collaborative team that was laser-focused on winning. Watching this team come together and execute their work to the highest standard when the stakes couldn’t be higher will always be one of the highlights of my career. Moral of the story: experience and expertise matter, but trust, respect, and collaboration matter just as much!

Job opportunities:

Another plug to hire some of the amazing folks from the BFP digital team!

🧵Thread we think you should read (and retweet) 🧵

Closing:

Thanks for riding with me on this edition of “Does this bring money or votes?”

If you’d like to learn more about all of the digital work that happened this cycle, the DNC Mobilization team is hosting a post election debrief on December 10th from 12-4pm ET. Join us and hear all about the strategies that brought in money or votes and helped deliver a historic win for Democrats this year straight from the horse’s mouth.

Talk soon,

Esteban

Hey, it’s Jose – your favorite DNC email director – back again. I’m here today to share how our email program went above and beyond during an election in which building authentic, personal connections with supporters over digital was critical. 

The gist: By focusing our efforts on good content, deliverability, and reactivating inactive supporters, the DNC managed to massively scale up both fundraising and organizing to finish the cycle with impressive results. Let’s dive in:

Feature:

In theory, the goals of the DNC’s email program mirror that of the Mobilization team: Bring in money and votes. In practice, we leverage email far more for money than votes. 

That’s partially by design – organizing doesn’t scale the same as fundraising over email. But by the spring, as the pandemic grew and the emphasis of our organizing efforts shifted to digital, it was clear we were going to have to rethink our approach.

The key to doing both rested in launching our first-ever dedicated reactivation program, which allowed us to considerably expand our universe of supporters – and the money they gave – without significantly increasing email volume. That, in turn, freed up resources for us to build out our organizing program to meet the moment. 

So that’s how we entered the general election: More money, more votes, win the election. And that’s exactly what we did.

Fundraising

On the money side, we continued to break records even as the scope of our team’s work grew. Take a look:

Compared to 2016, our email program increased revenue by 160%, with revenue per email increasing 175% – showing that these gains weren’t just because of increased investments in acquisition.

As I outlined in this newsletter in May, a lot of this strength comes from how our team has remained laser-focused on deliverability throughout the cycle. But what’s particularly exciting is how we built on that work in the final months of the election, standing up a deliverability program that accounted for over 16% of the DNC’s online fundraising revenue in the final quarter of the election.

Reactivation

The DNC’s online fundraising program is nearly two decades old, and we have millions of inactive supporters we no longer contact. 

We set out to build a thoughtful and systematic way of reengaging them – one that wouldn’t get us in spam jail and could give us insights that would help us continue this work in future cycles. Led by Anna Kelsey, who joined us this summer from the Warren campaign, our program took a twofold approach: 

First, we did a series of one-off reactivation sends in big moments, expanding our sending universe to include inactive prospects. 

The most extreme example of this was immediately following the announcement of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s pick for vice president, when we emailed our entire inactive file and reactivated 875,000 supporters. But it wasn’t just that moment – convention speeches, fundraising deadlines, and emails from high-profile surrogates were all opportunities for us to bring people back into the fold.

Second, we created a number of cohorts based on different engagement factors and ran them all through the same automated series to compare performance. These cohorts, based on data like total opens, donation history, status on the OFA and HFA lists, and more, allowed us to compare more factors against each other – data that is unique to the age and scope of the DNC’s program and that will help guide this work in the future.

Watch this space for a newsletter from Anna diving into this work with more depth. In the meantime, I’ll say this: By focusing on reactivation, we were able to keep revenue climbing upward without significantly increasing email volume — which freed up resources for us to focus on the votes side of our program.

Digital Organizing

Alongside our digital organizing team, we built out the most robust organizing email programs in the DNC’s history. That work included:

An automated email chase program for IWillVote.com, which used Action Network’s ladders tool and the voter file to urge supporters who requested voter registration and vote-by-mail applications via IWillVote.com to complete their applications. 

(You can read more about the IWillVote.com chase program here.)

Voter education pushes in 17 battleground states. Each explained exactly how, where, and when folks could vote in their state, with a sharable video featuring President Barack Obama.

State-targeted rapid response emails in response to litigation and other changes in voting rule in places like Pennsylvania and Florida. 

A chase series to supporters with outstanding mail-in ballots asking them to complete their ballots. The last email of the series, sent on October 20, told supporters to return their mail-in ballots to the nearest dropbox.

An automated voter engagement welcome series for IWillVote.com. Supporters who completed the information capture on IWillVote.com received a series of organizing touchpoints, including getting a virtual commit to vote card, an ask to make their plan to vote on MakeAPlan.com, and an ask to volunteer with the Biden campaign.

Our data on the impact of these organizing touchpoints is limited, but what we have is encouraging – for example, over 65% of people who opened an email from our automated IWillVote.com chase emails completed their vote-by-mail applications.

Job opportunities:

How about you hire a member of Biden for President’s outstanding digital team? Check out our directory here.

🧵Thread we think you should read (and retweet) 🧵

Closing:

I’m extremely proud of the program the DNC’s email team ran this cycle. We respected our supporters, met them where they were (even amid a pandemic), and brought in the money and votes needed to carry Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the White House – all in all, a job well done.

Until next time,

Jose

Helloooooo and welcome to the next edition of DTBIMOV! (I tried, it doesn’t work, we’re moving on.)

I’m Meg DiMartino, the digital organizing director at the DNC, and I’m really excited to share an overview of what the GOTV (this one works great!) operation was at the DNC this cycle. Let’s GOTN (get out the newsletter) 👇

IWillVote.com

First, let’s start with some toplines of where we landed with IWillVote.com this cycle:

• IWillVote.com had over 21 million unique visitors in the 2020 cycle. We expanded the functionality of the site to, for the first time, allow voters to request and track their vote-by-mail ballot all from IWillVote.com. Amidst the pandemic, this upgrade was key to making sure voters had the state-specific info and tools they needed to turnout.

  

• And our bread and butter: polling place lookup support! On Election Day alone, we saw 1.2 million users on IWillVote.com and over 2 million pageviews, which is a 260% increase since Election Day 2018. On Election Day alone, over 400,000 voters found their polling place!

• Over the course of GOTV (Oct 31 - Nov 3), we saw 2.17M polling place lookups across IWillVote partners, which is roughly the same amount we saw for the entire year of 2018.

  • A peek at polling place lookup stats in a few key states:

    • Pennsylvania - 180K

    • Michigan - 96K

    • Georgia - 74K

    • Arizona - 69K

GOTV Goals

As a complement to the Biden campaign, the DNC ran a hefty GOTV program broken up into two parts, voter contact & planned content. We had three main goals:

1. Reach voters in every ZIP code

2. Respond to people’s questions when we send them voting content and include an accessible way for people to reach us

3. Triple the impact of people who have already voted

REACH VOTERS IN EVERY ZIP CODE

A distributed texting program, affectionately known as Text out the Vote, is a tried & true tradition at the DNC, and 2020 was no different.

Across our 264-person DNC text team, composed of DNC staff & family, we sent over 1.1 million texts for mobilizing voters to take actions in some really critical states.

We sent these texts into 16 states, including ones like Alaska, Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Wyoming. 

Facebook Organizing

We know that voters are on Facebook and joining online communities, and sharing voting content is one of the best ways to reach people everywhere. This cycle, we posted in 1,089 groups with a combined total reach of 13.4 million.

In addition to focusing on organizing in these groups regionally, we also were sure to use them as a coalition building tool. For example, in total, we reached out to 134 Latinx community groups on Facebook, reaching over 391,000 people. 

We ended the cycle with 1,698 online community leaders that we leveraged during GOTV to help us spread our message and helpful voter education info across Facebook.

And if you’re interested in Facebook group organizing, #WatchThisSpace for a newsletter that goes deeper on that soon.

Planned SMS Content

One of our BIG goals we accomplished going into the 2020 cycle was to build a broadcast SMS list of at least 1% of eligible Democratic voters in a given battleground state -- both to do short term GOTV and build long-term assets for the future. Since 2020 began, we’ve had nearly 925% growth in battleground states to our SMS list. 

Across broadcast SMS, we sent out over 100 state-specific text messages for early vote, voter registration, and other get out the vote reminders into traditional battleground states and also important expansion states like Mississippi, Louisiana & Missouri. In total, we reached almost 15 million voters. And we did all of this while also having the best SMS fundraising month ever in October.

We also built up a robust rapid response program that was able to reach voters in states like Arizona, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Georgia to inform them of voting information changing.

Portable Voter Ed Tools

This year, we also made at-your-fingertips voter education tools using our broadcast SMS capabilities. Our on-the-go “Voter Toolkit” took 50 states worth of state and precinct level data and made it instantly accessible to voters when they needed it, all with the tap of a finger.

• VOTE or POLLS: To look up polling places, as well as open dates and times. 

• ID: Where voters can access info on their state’s voter ID requirements and how they can learn more. 

• CURBSIDE: For info on curbside voting availability in all 50 states 

• ASK, HOTLINE or QUESTION: To get connected with the Voter Assistance Hotline or accessible textline.

VOTER CORRESPONDENCE

With voter education outbound content comes the need to make sure we are responding to voters when they have questions! As such, voter correspondence was a key part to our success in making sure every voter had what they needed.

Accessible Text Line

An accessible voter textline staffed by 50 disability rights lawyers to answer voter education and voter protection inquiries from folks for whom the voice hotline is not accessible. (Fun fact -- we got a vendor, recruited and trained volunteers, and launched this textline in 72 hours!)

Voter Education Inbox

A voter assistance correspondence program. We created vote@dnc.org, an email inbox that all voter education email replies pointed towards, and staffed that inbox with a distributed volunteer team who answered questions, escalated issues to our voter protection team, and reported on trends.

Broadcast SMS Inbox

To complement the voter education and GOTV messages we sent out of our broadcast SMS program, we engaged a volunteer Mobile Commons Response Team to monitor our broadcast SMS inbox and answer questions about voting.

Altogether, these programs sent over 15,000 replies assisting voters!

VOTE TRIPLING

Knowing that Vote Tripling is a powerful organizing tool, especially in a year with record turnout before Election Day voting, we integrated the tactic across DNC programs:

• Every peer to peer texting script included a vote tripling ask, and our broadcast SMS program regularly employed this tactic. 

• We created an “Already Voted” Action Kit that breaks down vote tripling and shares how to use it to organize one’s friends and family. 

• We also used our email organizing muscle to send this ask out to people who have already voted to get them to forward to their friends. 

• In total, our vote tripling asks reached over 1 million voters over email. 

Job opportunities:

Today, I’d like to plug a post election digital debrief that we will be hosting in a few weeks. Please sign up to join us or even lead a session here.

🧵Thread we think you should read (and retweet) 🧵

Closing:

GOTV is my favorite holiday, it’s the most spirited time of the year, and a true culmination of why we do what we do. I have been so proud to do this work at the DNC and truly so thankful to you for reading about it today! Please share with your networks and reach out with questions.

Cheers,

Meg

Hey y’all! Welcome to the next edition of “Does this bring money or votes?” -- we’re Jess Porter, the DNC’s Deputy Email Director and SMS Program Manager, and Sam Aleman, a Digital Organizer at the DNC. We are here to tell you how we mobilized voters, recruited volunteers, and continued to shatter fundraising records using our broadcast SMS list -- and, more importantly, how it worked. So, prepare for takeoff.

Feature:

Building the plane 🧑‍✈️

Our broadcast SMS program saw explosive growth in this election cycle -- much of which resulted from collaborations with the Biden for President and Democratic National Convention teams. From July to November alone, our list nearly quadrupled in size, more importantly, our subscriber base in battleground states grew by 520%. Mobilizing our subscribers in battlegrounds, in particular, was more important than ever to win back the White House and seats across the country.

We knew two things for certain: 

1) This election cycle would heavily rely on digital communication; 

2) There would be a lot of competition when it came to mobilizing folks online. 

We wanted to mimic as closely as possible the experience our subscribers would have if they spoke to local field organizers in person, got invitations from a campaign to attend volunteer events, or even just had their door knocked on at home. The challenge being: We had to do it all directly on their phones in under 160 characters.

Flying the plane 🛫

We worked closely with the DNC’s Tech, Voter Protection, and Design teams to make our messages as personal and applicable as possible. From September 28 through November 3, we sent over 100 organizing broadcasts. Topics ranged from voter education to organizing opportunities to reminders to vote. Some of our favorites came about with the weirdness of the election, like these multimedia messages we sent to Pennsylvania and South Carolina about critical voting updates:

On top of sending broadcast messages, we set up opt-in paths as unique ways to get information to voters. Folks could text VOTE to 43367 for ballot drop-off locations as well as early voting and Election Day voting places and hours. We also set up ACCESS to 43367, which shared curbside voting information and guided subscribers to the textable hotline. This all helped provide our supporters with vital voting information in the most straightforward way possible.

Landing the plane 🛬

In the run-up to Election Day, we used the voter file to identify subscribers who already voted. Instead of sending them further voting updates, we asked them to volunteer, make sure their friends and family voted , and even sent them a virtual "I Voted" sticker. We also set up opt-in paths powered by data from our Voter Protection team to make sure that the folks who hadn’t voted yet could get access to the info they were looking for as quickly as possible.

A quick note on fundraising 

Even while all of this wonderful organizing content was being sent -- it made up about 40% of the texts our subscribers received in October -- the DNC still had our best month of broadcast SMS fundraising ever. But it’s not rocket science, y’all! It’s just common sense. Voters are donors. Donors are also donors. So, we’ll leave you with this:

Job opportunities:

We still have a ton of great folks between the BFP digital and DNC mobilization teams looking for the ~next thing~. Check them out!

🧵Thread we think you should read (and retweet) 🧵

Closing:

Thanks for reading about the importance of organizing and fundraising alongside our grassroots supporters wherever they may be -- and for being in this fight. Stay tuned for even more from our organizing and fundraising teams! It’s been an honor to have you aboard.

Until next time, 

Jessica & Sam

Hey everyone, welcome to the first *post-election* edition of “Does This Bring in Money or Votes?” — we’re Patrick Stevenson, the Chief Mobilization Officer, and Heather Reid, the Deputy Chief Mobilization Officer here at the DNC. The last time you heard from us, we were talking about all the infrastructure the DNC mobilization team had been building in prep for 2020 — that was building the plane, and we’ve spent the last 7 months flying it.

Our biggest takeaway from 2020? If you can be strategic with hiring and resources and intentional about building an integrated team, you can pull off almost anything — including unseating an incumbent president in the middle of a pandemic.

Feature:

Last time we talked, we told you about combining the once-siloed programs of digital and direct marketing into one powerhouse mobilization team — a team that was prepping to execute on years of infrastructure building, but also a team that had not existed in a presidential cycle before.

After years of work, we ended this cycle with the biggest mobilization (or digital, or direct marketing) team the DNC has ever seen. By keeping to a few core principles, we were able to build a ruthlessly competent, diverse, nimble, and joyful team that executed some of the most robust programs in the history of the DNC.

A few toplines:

• We entered Election Day with a team of 51 brilliant staff — over 3 in 4 identify as women and nearly half identify as people of color.

• We have raised over $135MM so far from our grassroots fundraising program in 2020 — nearly quadruple what we raised in 2016.

• In the final three months of the 2020 election, the size of our SMS list nearly quadrupled.

• In September 2020 we set a new all-time record for DNC monthly sustaining donations with 83,000 donors giving $1.8 million in a single month. 

• We hired our first-ever in-house digital advertising team, and made an unprecedented eight-figure investment in grassroots donor acquisition — an increase of 785% over the previous four-year period. So far, this investment has paid back well over 300%.

• We saw nearly 21 million visitors to IWillVote.com this cycle, including 2.17 million polling place lookups between October 31 and November 3, 2020.

• We focused on organic audience growth where it mattered — between July 2019 and November 2020, we grew our Snapchat audience by over 850%.

• We overhauled the DNC’s brand and visual identity, including a complete rebuild of democrats.org.

• With our partners at BFP, we ran the first-ever influencers program at the DNC, helping build relationships with 500+ creators and distributors with authoritative voting information.

First, hiring. One North Star we used to build these programs is to hire top-notch people who aren’t just great practitioners in their own chosen fields, but who are also intellectually curious and scrappy at the same time.

It also means no ego. We intentionally sought out, recruited, hired, and trained people who our vice president-elect would call “joyful warriors.” We built a team of folks who were ready to do more and learn something new, and who wanted to roll this boulder up a hill together with our friends on the Biden campaign. For us, that included a mix of some best-in-class political operatives, some talented newcomers from other industries (like fashion and film) who wanted to bring their expertise to this mission, and some hungry new organizers, fundraisers, and creatives.

Those guiding principles allow for individuals to broaden their scope of work in ways that are meaningful to them and to the team. That means empowering folks who run our broadcast SMS program to think about how we can not only build historically strong SMS fundraising, but also use this channel to educate voters in battleground states (more to come on that this week!). That means building a marketing team of talented staff who understand direct mail nose-to-tail and are also eager to learn how to run peer-to-peer SMS campaigns and manage GOTV volunteers. 

For most of the cycle, these folks fit into three buckets of work:

Next: resources. The other North Star for our work has been being strategic about resources, whether that’s time, money, or staff. Especially during GOTV, we shifted a lot of staff capacity to where it would make the most difference.

During the late-October direct mail lull, we surged capacity from our direct marketing team to manage our TOTV efforts and volunteers. 

We moved some of our video team into sourcing folks on social media who were having trouble getting information they needed to vote so we could reach out to them and help. 

Once we got through our October fundraising deadline, some of our email team moved over to help get pro-Dem messaging and voter education information into Facebook groups in battleground states. 

So that first chart looked a bit like this on Election Day. Obviously this doesn’t account for every human, but is a good representative sample of how everything shook out! ⤵️

One of the most important takeaways: None of this work would have been as robust or effective without an unprecedented level of trust and partnership between the DNC and the Biden campaign. Whether it was grassroots fundraising or digital organizing or anything in between, this work *worked* because it was done hand in hand with our partners on the campaign — what we call “the most ambitious crossover event in history.”

So what else is coming to you from this incredible team? Well, dear reader, over the coming days and weeks, you can expect to hear more about:

• Continuing to land in historically high numbers of inboxes while also bringing inactive supporters back onto our email list.

• Breaking all sorts of new ground on IWillVote.com and with digital organizing.

• How to expand voter education in a pandemic: using broadcast SMS, Facebook groups, and a brand-new influencer program to help deliver credible voting info to the people who need it.

• Results from our first cycle with an in-house ads program.

And lots more. So keep an eye on your inboxes and look out for some tweets.

Job opportunities:

Let’s flip the script today! At both the DNC and Biden for President, there’s a whole mess of wildly talented, creative, professionals who are looking for what’s next. Hire them!

🧵Thread we think you should read (and retweet) 🧵

A lookback and some wisdom from the GOAT, Caitlin Mitchell:

Closing:

Thanks to each and every one of you who came along with us on this ride. Whether you donated, volunteered your time, helped a first-time voter in your life get to the polls, or just read along with us, you helped make this happen. 

We are so excited to get to work with a Democrat back in the White House — right after a nap. Keep an eye on this space for lots more to come.

- Patrick and Heather

Hello and welcome back to “Does this bring in money or votes?” -- the DNC Mobilization team’s newsletter. We’re Davis Leonard, the DNC’s Deputy Digital Organizing Director, and Anna Kelsey, the DNC’s Grassroots Prospects Manager.

We’re here to tell you about how we chase IWillVote.com users from their first visit to the website all the way to the ballot box.

Feature:

IWillVote.com is a one-stop shop for everything a voter needs to get ready to vote. Voters can learn about voting in their state, look up their voting locations, register to vote, and request a mail-in ballot all in one place. On the backend, IWillVote is an exciting repository of information about just where voters are in their journey to voting -- data we were excited to use to create a new style of program for the DNC Mobilization team that brings a personalized, customer-service style IWillVote.com experience directly to voters’ inboxes with specific, actionable emails. And while we’ll have to wait until all the votes are counted to measure the true efficacy of our program, we have seen that over 60% of voters who received a delivery notification email ended up returning their application!

THE BASICS

The three main goals of our program were to meet voters where they are, leverage the DNC’s data and tech tools, and to make sure we were matching an automated program with human backup to answer any questions -- so that when voters engage with this content and want help, we’re there to provide it.

At its core, the program has two “tracks” for visitors to IWillVote -- the “Friendly Follow-Up” and the “Application Chase.” The Friendly Follow-Up track is for visitors we don’t know much about -- we don’t have enough information to give them a specific action item, but we do want to make sure they know we’re here for questions.

The Application Chase is the more intensive experience -- for voters who use IWillVote to request a Voter Registration or Vote-By-Mail Application, we’re able to track when that application is shipped and delivered, sending them timely automated email notifications and helpful reminders about their state’s deadlines to return them.

Here’s how we did it.

THE TECHNICAL STUFF

Building a program that could do this for thousands of voters in every state-- each with their own unique and often changing deadlines and voting rules, was a big challenge. We utilized two powerful tools -- ActionNetwork’s Ladders and Movable Ink ---- to make our voter education as adaptable as the moment demanded.

The last thing we’d want is a voter referring to an email in their inbox with out of date information. We used Movable Ink to create dynamic images for each of our application chase emails, which meant that every voter received accurate, always-up-to-date information about their state’s deadlines based on the latest data from IWillVote.com, even if something changed after the email first arrived.

The next piece is sending the emails themselves to the right people, at the right time, based on the right IWillVote actions -- that’s where the Action Network ladder comes in. “Ladders” are collections of steps that can do different things, like send an email, and “decision points” that decide whether to send someone down one set of steps or another.

As applications are marked as shipped or out for delivery by USPS and synced into our system, voters are “triggered” into ladders, and receive emails on specific intervals as needed. For example, six days after the first delivery notification email, we send a follow-up reminder -- but only if the voter’s application isn’t in the mail or back at their election official’s office already and their state’s deadline hasn’t passed.

Here’s an outline of what all those decisions look like in the delivery notification ladder:

*For the people who want ALL of the details

THE FOLLOW-THROUGH

We knew it was important to make sure we weren’t only reaching out with the information we thought voters needed, but to provide them a place to seek out information too. In every email, we let them know they could get any questions they had answered by calling the Voter Assistance Hotline, or simply by hitting reply and sending us their question right within the email chain. Replies were sent to vote@dnc.org, a volunteer-staffed distributed voter education inbox.

We are all about lowering barriers to asking questions, being ready with more information in-stream when sending out voter education information, and meeting voters where they are!

Job opportunities:

This time, we’re asking for VOLUNTEERS!! It’s GOTV, and that only means one thing: voter contact! Make some calls, send some texts, and help us bring this home. Get started here.

🧵Thread we think you should read (and retweet) 🧵

Closing:

Thanks for reading! We’re excited to see just how effective this program can be, and use everything we’ve learned from it to continue to reach voters where they are! Huge shoutout to our team for their willingness to dive into the weeds of branching ladders, USPS codes, endless variations of Movable Ink, and their fierce dedication to helping voters.

If you enjoyed reading this newsletter, we hope you’ll share it with your friends, colleagues, or anyone who loves a good chase!

Thanks for being a part of this,

Davis & Anna